liberal is someone who believes that the right economic system, the right political reforms, the right curriculum, the right psychotherapy, and the right moral posture will do away with unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, tragic conflict, and neurosis. A liberal is a person who thinks that there is a straight road to health and happiness.

In order that everything should be reduced to the same level it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, a spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage — and that phantom is The Public. It is only in an age which is without passion, yet reflective, that such a phantom can develop itself with the help of The Press which itself becomes an abstraction.

The public is a monstrous nothing. The public is a concept which could not have occurred in antiquity, because the people en masse, in corpore (als een substantie. svh) took part in any situation that arose, and were responsible for the actions of the individual, and, moreover, the individual was personally present and had to submit ar once to applause or disapproval for his decision.

Only when the sense of association in society is no longer strong enough to give life to concrete realities is the Press able to create that abstraction ‘the public,’ consisting of unreal individuals who never are and never can be united in an actual situation or organization — and yet are held together as a whole.

The public is a host, more numerous than all the peoples together, but it is a body which can never be reviewed, it cannot even be represented, because it is an abstraction. Nevertheless, when the age is reflective and passionless and destroys everything concrete, the public becomes everything and is supposed to include everything. And that again shows how the individual is thrown back upon himself.

The man who has no opinion of an event at the actual moment accepts the opinion of the majority, or, if he is quarrelsome, of the minority. But it must be remembered that both majority and minority are real people, and that is why the individual is assisted by adhering to them. A public, on the contrary, is an abstraction. To adopt the opinion of this or that man means that one knows that they will be subjected to the same dangers as oneself, that they will be led astray with one if the opinion leads astray. But to adopt the same opinion as the public is a deceptive consolation because the public is only there in abstracto.

Hierin zit het grote gevaar van de opiniemaker van de commerciële media. De Buruma’s doen alsof zij namens het niet bestaande publiek spreken, maar in werkelijkheid spreken ze voor zichzelf, en hun opdrachtgevers. Ondertussen geldt dat ‘no majority has ever been so certain of being right and victorious as the public,’ zo schreef Kierkegaard, om daar de waarschuwing aan toe te voegen ‘that it is not much consolation to the individual, for a public is a phantom which forbids all personal contact. And if a man adopts public opinion today and is hissed tomorrow he is hissed by the public.’ Kierkegaard benadrukte dat ‘the ultimate difference between the modern world and antiquity is: that “the whole” is not concrete and is therefore unable to support the individual, or to educate him as the concrete should,’ en dat een

public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, and still the public will be less than a single man, however unimportant. The qualification ‘public’ is produced by a juggling of an age of reflection, which makes it appear flattering to the individual who in this way can arrogate (zich toeëigenen. svh) to himself this monster, in comparison with which concrete realities seem poor. The public is the fairy story of an age understanding, which in imagination makes the individual into something even greater than a king above his people; but the public is also a gruesome abstraction through which the individual will receive his religious information — or sink.

the public tires, and says it may stop. That is an example of how the public levels. Their betters and superiors in strength are mishandled — and the dog remains a dog which even the public despises. The leveling is therefore done by a third party; a non-existent public with the help of a third party which in its insignificance is less than nothing, being already more than leveled.

Het resultaat is dat

The public is unrepentant, for it is not they who own the dog — they only subscribe. They neither set the dog on anyone, nor whistle it off — directly. If asked they would answer: the dog is not mine, it has no master. And if the dog had to be killed they would say: it was really a good thing that bad-tempered dog was put down, everyone wanted it killed — even the subscribers.

With the proper gift, a man can turn the crowd into a mob — in other words, a passionate crowd. The mob is a pseudo-society that sets out to do something, but what it wishes to do is often both negative and general…

The function of the mob, to destroy, is general. It is incapable of making differentiations upon which a society depends.

The negative impuls is easier for an orator to instill in a crowd. A crowd is passive, and therefore notoriously fickle (grillig. svh).

The press, he argues, is fundamentally irresponsible because its writers are anonymous and do not assume responsibility for what they print. In addition to undertaking an ethical critique of the press, Kierkegaard was one of the first to see that the press is a mass medium that addresses its audience as members of a crowd and that itself helps massify society. The press plays a fundamental role, Kierkegaard suggests, in producing a public, a crowd devoid of individuality and independent judgement, their thought determined by the authority of printed words and editorial fiat. The average man in the street, Kierkegaard suggests, ‘believes that what appears in the newspapers is public opinion, the voice of the people and of truth.’ For this mentality, ‘anything that appears in print,’ is regarded ‘as infallible’ by the average reader who asks: ‘Is it possible that anything can be a lie which is printed in countless copies, is read all over the country, and, from what I hear, no one yet has ventured to refute.’

Kierkegaard points to the ways that the press simulates authority and objectivity and can thus make a lie appear as truth or an opinion as fact. Repeating and circulating stories in the press provides an aura of fact, and opinions expressed appear important and substantial. Kierkegaard shows how the press in this way manufactures public opinion and promotes social untruth under the guise of truth and objectivity. Indeed, the history of journalism has many examples of lies that destroyed individual reputations, formed public opinion, and promotes events like wars.

During the big antiwar protests in early 2003, Ta-Nehisi Coates was a deliveryman for a deli in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He, too, was ‘sceptical,’ he wrote a decade later in a blog post for the Atlantic, ‘but if the US was going to take out a mad tyrant, who was I to object?’ After all, as Coates remembered, ‘every “sensible” and “serious” person you knew — left or right — was for the war.’ ‘I am not a radical,’ Coates said. Even so he found it ‘searing’ to watch ‘reasonable people assemble sober arguments for a disaster.’

In retrospect, the most remarkable of these reasonable people were not the neoconservatives but the liberals — some of them now Coates’s colleagues and supporters — who recommended war and condoned (vergoelijken. svh) torture while advancing America’s mission to bring democracy to the world’s benighted. In ‘The Fight Is for Democracy’ (2003), George Packer argued that a ‘vibrant, hardheaded liberalism’ could use the American military to promote its values. The subtitle of ‘The Good Fight’ (2006) by Peter Beinart, the then editor of the New Republic, insisted ‘Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again.’ ‘It’s time to think of torture,’ Newsweek declared a few weeks after 9/11. ‘Focused brutality,’ Time recommended. Vanity Fair praised Rumsfeld for his ‘oddly reassuring ruthlessness.’ As the invasion of Iraq got underway, the Atlantic, described as ‘prestigious’ by Coates in his new book, walked its readers through the advantages of ‘torture-lite’ in a cover story. In the New York Times Magazine, Michael Ignatieff, biographer of Isaiah Berlin and professor of human rights, exhorted Americans to embrace their imperial destiny and offered his own suggestions for ‘permissible duress.’ Even the New Yorker, fastidiously aloof from Beltway schemers during the Cold War, published a report by Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic’s current editor, detailing links between al-Qaida and Iraq — links later revealed to be non-existent.

Goldberg’s article was seized on by Bush and Cheney: the New Yorker had become, as an unusually bold writer in the Nation pointed out, ‘one more courtier straining to get the king’s ear.’ But the Bush administration didn’t need eggheads to euphemise pre-emptive war, torture, rendition and indefinite offshore detention. Bush’s own demotic — ‘We’ll smoke them out,’ ‘wanted dead or alive,’ ‘Pretty soon, we’ll have to start displaying scalps’ — repeatedly invoked wars of extirpation against what the Declaration of Independence had called ‘merciless Indian Savages.’ ‘When this is all over,’ Cofer Black, Bush’s chief counterterrorist adviser, assured his boss, ‘the bad guys are going to have flies walking across their eyeballs.’ The mood was infectious among the personnel in charge of exterminating the brutes. The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan cheerfully reported that ‘Welcome to Injun Country’ was the refrain among American soldiers worldwide. The primal blood-lusts of the war on terror survived Obama’s renaming of it. The Seal Team that in 2011 eventually scalped Osama bin Laden (code-named Geronimo) carried 14-inch hatchets made by a North Carolina knife-maker known for his blades in the 1992 film ‘The Last of the Mohicans.’ Obama administration officials volunteered details of the wildly popular slaying to the makers of the 2012 film ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ which depicted (falsely) swarthy villains revealing bin Laden’s hideout under torture.

‘A racist society can’t but fight a racist war,’ James Baldwin wrote in 1967, ‘the assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.’ During the war on terror the traffic between the US and various shithole countries wasn’t only in assumptions: there was also a wholesale exporting of equipment, technologies of torture and bad lieutenants. To take one instance, Richard Zuley, a specialist at Guantánamo, had become reassuringly ruthless while working for a Chicago police unit that for decades interrogated predominantly African-Americans at so-called black sites. It’s only now, with a white supremacist ensconced in the White House, that those same hardheaded liberals – who did so much to create a climate of opinion and a legal regime in which black and brown bodies could be seized, broken and destroyed outside all norms and laws of war — are coming to grips with ‘America’s Original Sin: Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy’ (an unlikely recent headline in Foreign Affairs). Back in the early 2000s the liberal universalists seemed unaware that their project might be fatally flawed, and that America’s own democracy had been secured by mass bondage, colonial dispossession and wars of aggression; they still hadn’t fully reckoned with the historical legacy of institutionalized racial cruelty, inequality and division — what Coates has come to describe.

‘In America,’ Coates writes, ‘it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.’ ‘To be black’ is to be perpetually ‘naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape and disease.’ The liberal freedoms of propertied men were always defined against omnipresent threats: mutinous natives, rebellious slaves. The white man, Tocqueville wrote as he observed race relations in America, ‘is to the men of other races what man himself is to the animals,’ in the sense that he ‘makes them serve his purposes, and when he cannot make them bend, he destroys them.’ A social order built on systemic violence made the black man, Tocqueville recognized, an ever present menace in his white master’s imagination. This proximity to a nemesis made a culture of fear central to American politics, entailing a continuous investment in the machinery of coercion, surveillance and control, along with pre-emptive brutality against internal and external enemies.

Coates, who was born in 1975, came of age just as a new Jim Crow was emerging domestically to accompany Bush Sr’s new world order. ‘By God, we’ve kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!’ So Bush Sr said in a euphoric victory statement at the end of the Gulf War. The kicking of the Vietnam Syndrome and ‘Saddam Hussein’s ass’ signaled the removal of all restraints on American power imposed by dogged gooks and their traitorous allies on the American left. With America free to police the world, old legal and moral barriers were also dismantled at home. Just as Coates entered Howard University and began his harsh education in American history, the stage was set for a pitiless imposition of market discipline and evisceration of welfare-state protections. Such drastic socioeconomic re-engineering required a fresh public consensus, and a racialised view of crime and national security came in handy in separating the deserving from the undeserving. Under Reagan, the police had started to resemble the military with its special weapons and bellicose posturing. The prison-industrial complex burgeoned under Bill Clinton: an incarcerated population of 300,000 in 1970 expanded to 2.1 million in 2000 — the majority black and brown, and poor. Liberals did not simply inherit Republican schemes of harsh policing and extreme punishment. They took the initiative. Clinton, hailed as the ‘first black president’ by Toni Morrison (zwarte Amerikaanse schrijfster, die in 1993 de Nobelprijs voor Literatuur kreeg, en in 2012 de hoogste civiele Amerikaanse onderscheiding: de Presidential Medal of Freedom), ended what he called ‘welfare as we know it’ and deregulated financial markets. Amid a national panic about ‘street terrorists’, he signed the most draconian crime bill in US history in 1994, following it up two years later with an anti-terrorism bill that laid the foundation for the Patriot Act of 2001.

The intimate relationship between America’s internal and external wars, established by its original sin, has long been clear. The question was always how long mainstream intellectuals could continue to offer fig-leaf euphemisms for shock-and-awe racism, and suppress an entwined history of white supremacism and militarisation with fables about American exceptionalism, liberalism’s long battle with totalitarianism, and that sort of thing. Hurricane Katrina, coming after the non-discovery of WMDs in Iraq, undermined liberal faith in Bush’s heavily racialised war. American claims to global moral leadership since the 1960s had depended greatly on the apparent breakthrough of the civil rights movement, and the sidelining of the bigots who screamed: ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation for ever.’ In New Orleans, black bodies naked before the elements of the world — elements which included trigger-happy Blackwater mercenaries guarding the rich — made it clear that old-style racial separation had been replaced by sharply defined zones of prosperity and destitution: segregation for ever. But the apparent successes of social liberalism, culminating in Obama’s election, managed to obscure the new regimes of racial sequester for a while longer. Since the 1990s, the bonanzas of free trade and financial deregulation had helped breed greater tolerance for racial and sexual variety, primarily among the privileged — the CIA under Obama set up a recruiting office at the Miami Beach Gay Pride parade. Overt racism and homophobia had become taboo, even as imprisonment or premature death removed 1.5 million black men from public life. Diversification and multiculturalism among upwardly mobile, college-educated elites went together with mass incarceration at home and endless military interventions abroad.

Former CIA chief James Woolsey appeared on Fox News to push the narrative of how dastardly 'dem Russkies' are in their meddling with the sacred soul of America's democracy.

Woolsey did his patriotic deep-state-duty and proclaimed the evils of ‘expansionist Russia’ and dropped 'facts' like ‘Russia has a larger cyber-army than its standing army,’ before he moved on to China and its existential threats.

But then, beginning at around 4:30, the real debacle of the conversation begins as Ingraham (interviewster. svh) asks Woolsey,

‘Have we ever tried to meddle in other countries' elections?’

He responds, surprisingly frankly...

‘Oh probably... but it was for the good of the system…'

To which Ingraham follows up...

‘We don't do that now though? We don't mess around in other people's elections?’

Prompting this extraordinary sentence from a former CIA chief...

‘Well...hhhmmm, numm numm numm numm... only for a very good cause… in the interests of democracy’

US Interfered in Elections of at Least 85 Countries Worldwide Since 1945. America has a long history of meddling in the elections of foreign countries, new research shows. Levin, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie-Mellon University, found that the U.S. attempted to influence the elections of foreign countries as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000.

Comment: That’s just till 2000! The US has gone nuts since then.

Often covert in their execution, these efforts included everything from CIA operatives running successful presidential campaigns in the Philippines during the 1950s to leaking damaging information on Marxist Sandanistas in order to sway Nicaraguan voters in 1990. All told, the U.S. allegedly targeted the elections of 45 nations across the globe during this period, Levin’s research shows. In the case of some countries, such as Italy and Japan, the U.S. attempted to intervene in four or more separate elections.

Levin’s figures do not include military coups or regime change attempts following the election of a candidate the U.S. opposed, such as when the CIA helped overthrow Mohammad Mosaddeq, Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, in 1953.

Comment: If we add those in, we’re looking at the entire Earth having suffered from US meddling.

a powerful system of induced conformity to the needs of privilege and power. In sum, the mass media of the United States are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without significant overt coercion. This propaganda system has become even more efficient in recent decades with the rise of the national television networks, greater mass-media concentration, right-wing pressures on public radio and television, and the growth in scope and sophistication of public relations and news management,

In preparing his cycle studies, O'Neill read broadly in American history. He devoured Gustavus Meyers' History of Great Fortunes and Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901. From such works O'Neill sought to find data on how the rich and powerful gained control of railroads and oil pipelines. His plays also dealt with imperialism, with Admiral Dewey's visit to Manila, and with the U.S. penetration of the Far East. Unlike most American historians, however, O'Neill hardly saw the corruptions of the Gilded Age of American big business as a departure from the virtuous ideals of the American Revolution. One character drawn for a possible play on that subject hopes hat America will become the land of liberty and that the ‘impulse toward freedom will eventually lead to insight into what freedom really is.’ But with the possibilities of freedom come the temptations of sin and ‘the vanity of possession.’ To many historians of the American past, freedom is always in the making, rising, developing, even though retarded by economic scarcity or by a ruling elite that refuses to allow the full flowering of democracy. The playwright, perhaps more than the historian, shows us why democracy, even while offering formal freedom, breeds a deeper discontent, leaving people freed of oppression yet fettered to desire, a national character, as Tocqueville put it, that ‘is itself dominated by the passion for dominion.

Over O’Neill’s toneelstukken A Touch of the Poet (1957) en More Stately Mansions schreef professor Diggins:

Both plays dealt with the conviction that that American and American democracy had failed its ideals, a verdict that had been arrived at by Henry Adams and other historians who also bemoaned the forces of materialism and economic determinism and the incapacity of the Constitution to prevent the Civil War. But coming from an Irish immigrant background, O’Neill was more interested in recording what the search in recording what the search for material satisfaction had done to a people trying to escape material deprivation. The doctrine of economic determinism depicted people as victims of forces beyond their control. O’Neill, however, recognized that the people themselves created the conditions in which they found themselves. Unlike the economic determinists, who saw little role for free will in a modern capitalist society, O’Neill sensed that people freely allowed their covetous (hebzuchtige. svh) longings to determine their actions…

In American democracy the spirit of Liberty is said to prevail. But one wonders whether democracy nourishes equality or disdains it. Self-determinism would imply freedom only if the self were free of its desires and prepared to embrace democratic community… The country O’Neill writes about in the two plays examined here is both proud and vain. Americans look upon themselves as free, autonomous individuals while unconsciously submitting to the ‘tyranny’ of public opinion. What we think of ourselves may be inseparable from what others think of us.

So, while Hammed identifies with an inclusive, universal and humanist precept, Jane, ‘the woman,’ Julie ‘the gay lesbian’ and George 'the Black’ subscribe to political identities that are largely determined by biology. Furthermore, Abe, as a secular Jew, affiliates himself with an (imaginary) blood-based ethnocentric tribal identity. Clearly, the contemporary so called 'New Left' has no problem with marginal and exclusivist political identities that are often biologically oriented.

How has the contemporary ‘liberal’ discourse been sustained by people who subscribe to biologically-determined identity politics, yet often reject those who actually support equality, human rights issues and who are aIso often from the working class? Could it be that the 'New Left’ is detached from working class politics and instead focuses on a vague and inconsistent pseudo-empathic discourse primarily engaged in sectarian battles?

A fundamental question remains. What does this new form of social grouping and political bonding have to do with opposition to capital accumulation or the dominance of the power of mammon and mammonism? The answer is nothing.

In retrospect, the Left's decision to embrace ID politics sealed its fate as an effective force for social change. It helped the Left to accept its detachment from struggling classes, their values and interests. It marked a clear separation between the Left and socialism and even Left and the people. In the most peculiar way, it prepared the ground for the surge in popularity of New Right, Donald Trump in the USA, UKIP in Britain, the National Front in France and so on.